There is no end to the San Siro Stadium saga. The latest is that two former Members of the City of Milan – Giancarlo Tancredi and Ada De Cesaris – are among nine people under investigation over the Council’s sale of the San Siro Stadium in Milan, Italy, to the Serie A soccer giants AC Milan and Inter Milan, sources said on March 31st.
‘ansa.it’ stated that Fabrizio Grena and Marta Spaini, Consultants for Inter Milan and AC Milan, respectively, in relation to the San Siro Stadium, and the former Inter Corporate head honcho Alessandro Antonello are also being grilled, the sources revealed following the police searching the City offices and those of the M-I Stadio, the company set up by the clubs to manage the activities of the stadium.
The Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, commonly known as the San Siro Stadium, is a football stadium in the San Siro district of Milan, Italy. It has a seating capacity of 75,817 making it the largest stadium in Italy and one of the largest stadiums in Europe. It serves as the home stadium of the Serie A clubs AC Milan and Inter Milan.
The Milan or AC Milan is an Italian professional football club based in Milan, Lombardy (Italy). Founded in 1899, the club competes in the Serie A, the top tier of Italian football.
Inter, and commonly known as Inter Milan, is an Italian professional football club based in Milan, Lombardy (Italy). Inter is the only team to have always participated in the top division of Italian football (Serie A) since its debut in 1909 never being relegated to Serie B.
‘ansa.it’ further stated that the City sold the iconic ground to the Serie A soccer clubs for 197 million euros last year so that they can knock the venue down and build an avant-garde stadium on the site.
The investigators are looking into whether the controversial sale of the facility favored the private interests instead of public. They are probing the alleged leaking of confidential information and alleged bid rigging and in this regard nine people are being questioned.
Simona Collarini, former Director of the Municipality’s Urban Regeneration Department and solely responsible for the stadium’s decommissioning, is also being probed.
The searches were preceded, in recent days, by a series of hearings with the Municipal officials who, it has been learned, were heard as witnesses. The judge’s authorization document states that the suspects, through “informal agreements and collusion among themselves, in the context of the administrative proceedings aimed at the sale/development” of the San Siro area – which took place between 2017 and 2025 – “disturbed the administrative process aimed at determining the content of the public notice for the collection of the expressions of interest”. The legal proceedings regarding the stadium were opened following a series of complaints received by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, including one signed by the former Deputy Mayor of Milan Luigi Corbani and the music promoter Claudio Trotta, a Founder of the Sì Meazza Committee.
As stated in the search and seizure document issued by the Milan prosecutors the Municipality of Milan “partially departing” from the objectives that inspired the stadium law “in the development of the administrative procedure involving the private individuals – evidently with interests primarily aimed at optimizing the revenue – ended up clearly supporting their own entrepreneurial aims thus giving the entire operation a strongly speculative character”.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the public notice for the sale of the San Siro Stadium was “essentially based on the characteristics favored by the sports clubs Inter and AC Milan”. According to the allegations, the City of Milan and Inter and AC Milan engaged in “constant informal discussions and exchanges of non-transparent and improper information, documentation and drafts of the Municipal resolutions issued during the proceedings for the sale of the San Siro Stadium.”
The hypothesis to be tested is, therefore, whether the sale of the Meazza to Inter and Milan for which the Municipality received €197 million was a transaction that may have favored the private interests at the expense of the public interest. The investigation was opened to determine whether the chosen approach of “collecting expressions of interest” – with a notice published on March 24th, 2025, and closed on April 30th – as it was constructed, complied with the legal requirements, or whether an international tender should have been held.
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